Our local environment is linked to the rest of the universe in ways even more astonishing and exciting than those conceived by ancient astrologers. – Percy Seymour

The Moon and the Sun

The Buzzing Cicada Moon waxes throughout the week and reached perigee, its position closest to Earth, on July 21 at 5 a.m. It becomes full on July 23 at 9:37 p.m.

Rising in the evening and setting in the morning, this Moon passes overhead in the middle of the night, encouraging fish to bite, especially as the cool front of July 28 approaches.

The Sun enters its Deep Summer sign of Leo on July 22. As the trees darken with middle summer, the Sun slowly increases its apparent rate of its descent, falling a little more than one degree to a declination below 20 degrees by this date.

Weather Trends

The coolest days this week are typically the 22nd and 23rd when mild 70s are recorded about a fourth of all the years. Full moon and perigee are likely to cause a break in the heat this year, too. And five years in 10, at least one afternoon in the 70s follows the late-July cool wave that often arrives around the 28th. Evening lows in the 50s, unusual only two weeks ago, often occur. And throughout the country, average high temperatures drop one degree on the 28th, their first drop since late January.

Sunshine remains the rule for this week of the month, with three out of four days bringing at least a partial break in the clouds. Rainfall typically tapers off as July comes to a close, the chance of precipitation declining from 35 percent on the 24th down to just 20 percent on the 30th and 31st.

Zeitgebers

(Events in Nature that Tell the Time of Year)

Fruits of the Osage orange are two-thirds grown, heavy enough to drop in a storm. Woodlands and wetlands keep their avens, enchanter’s nightshade, lopseed, leafcup, touch-me-not, wood nettle, Joe Pye weed, monkey flower, and tall bell flower.

Pastures, roadsides, and alleys are full of chicory, Queen Anne’s lace, great mullein, wild petunia, milkweed, pokeweed, black-eyed Susan, butterfly weed, tall nettle, soapwort, St. John’s wort, gray-headed coneflower, blue vervain, white vervain, horseweed, oxeye, germander, teasel, fringed loosestrife, velvetleaf, wingstem, sundrops, small-flowered agrimony, bull thistle, tick trefoil, bush clover, burdock, showy and tall coneflower, jimson weed, pigweed, thin-leafed mountain mint, tick trefoil, downy false foxglove and three-seeded mercury.

Swallows migrate; they can often be seen congregating on the high wires. When the mornings are cool, fog hangs in the hollows before sunrise. A few Judas maples redden, betraying summer’s green. Shiny spicebush, boxwood, greenbriar, and poison ivy berries have formed.

Mind and Body

The S.A.D. Index, which measures seasonal stress on a scale from 1 to 100, rises into the 40s once again as the moon becomes full. It then declines toward the end of the month into the 30s and finally the 20s. The night is lengthening ever so slowly as Deep Summer deepens, but its effects are usually not apparent until August and the obvious changes in the landscape.

In the Field and Garden

The peach harvest peaks throughout the Lower Midwest and East. About half the field corn is silking. Almost half of the soybean crop is in bloom, and summer apples are around a third picked.

In a relatively dry summer, more than three-fourths of the winter wheat has been cut. Elderberries are turning purple, and the second cut of alfalfa is almost always half complete.

Aphid infestations increase markedly on the farm and in the garden.

Farmers are getting ready for August seeding of alfalfa, smooth brome grass, orchard grass, tall fescue, red clover and timothy. Set out autumn collards, kale, cabbage and broccoli. Check gourds and squash for beetles and rot.

Almanack Classics

The Junk Man’s Son

By Elizabeth Doren

When I was a child life was simpler. If you needed money, you earned it. No allowance, no handouts, but plenty of jobs. Some were routine, like doing dishes, making your bed, cleaning your room, feeding the chickens, gathering the eggs, pulling weeds in the garden, and a dozen others that you were given by virtue of being a member of the family.

But in addition to these routine chores there were special nuggets of opportunity, where you worked for real money, and seemingly the sky was the limit of what you might make.

Back in those days a junk man came around every few months and paid real money for rusty nails and scrap metal of all sorts. Getting rid of rusty nails was a worthy end on a farm powered by horses.

I watched the procedure of taking care of a horse’s foot injured by stepping on a nail, in the days before penicillin. My father made a solution of disinfectants and treated the foot twice a day for weeks, or so it seemed to me. He picked up the horse’s foot, turned it bottom side up, cleaned it and bathed it with the pink strong-smelling disinfectant.

It worked, and the horse was soon back in harness, and we were paid a penny a pound by the junk man for all the rusty nails we collected around the farm. Some years later we heard that the junk man’s son had gone to law school. Our rusty nails traveled far.

(Elisabeth Doren wrote, painted, gardened and tended to children and libraries during her long life. It has been many years since she passed away at the age of 94 and she is missed now more than ever.)

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THIS WEEK’S RHYMING SCKRAMBLER

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Bill Felker’s Daybook for July (with extensive details for every day of the month) is now available. For your autographed copy, send $20 to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, OH 45387. Or order from Amazon or from www.poorwillsalmanack.com.

Copyright 2021 - W. L. Felker